‘Train Dreams': A life-size American frontier film

There’s a scene I often return to in Apur Sansar (1959), the third in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, that’s an eloquent defence of ordinariness. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is being gently pulled up by a friend for his lack of ambition. He ventures that he’s writing a novel, and starts narrating the story: a boy grows up in the village, moves to the city, studies hard. “We feel he has in him seeds of greatness, but...” “He doesn’t succeed?” the friend guesses. “He doesn’t,” Apu replies. “But to him this isn’t a tragedy. He realises one must face reality. One must live!”

Robert Grainier wouldn’t be able to articulate this, but he’d agree. He’s a young orphan at the start of Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, in a tiny town in rural Idaho. “He quit attending school in his early teens, and the next two decades passed without much direction or purpose,” the voiceover says. He becomes a logger, and though he works a few other jobs, that’s the only real profession he has. He’s in his 80s when the film closes, and has lived most of his life in the same small town.

An unremarkable life, and a mysterious, beguiling film. Adapted by Bentley and Greg Kwedar from a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, it’s the antithesis of formidable making-of-America films like The Brutalist (2024). Bentley keeps the film’s world view as narrow as its protagonist’s. We hear nothing of world wars or quantum theory or talking pictures. All we see is what’s happening in Grainier’s life, which is barely anything. What’s going on in his head is a mystery too, thanks toa beautifully inward performance by Joel Edgerton.

This is Bentley’s second film, following the 2021 indie Jockey. It premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, after which Netflix won the distribution rights. There have been comparisons to Terrence Malick, and while this is the fate of most nature-inclined American indies, it isn’t inaccurate in the case of Train Dreams. Bentley is a fan, telling Screen Daily: “I love his films deeply... Working with nature, it is hard not to be influenced.” The bursts of violence amid bucolic surroundings certainly has a Malick touch. There’s also an echo of Days of Heaven (1978) in Grainier’s rough, cosy homestead with his wife (Felicity Jones) and baby daughter, and in Will Patton’s folksy voiceover (though Levon Helm’s narration in The Right Stuff [1983] might be an even better match, especially with the way Train Dreams ends).

Bentley does have his own voice, though, at once mystic and bracing. The first of Grainier’s “train dreams” is brief and startling; only later do we realise it includes both memory and premonition. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso’s clear, sharp shooting (a departure from the haze of Days of Heaven) doesn’t allow nostalgia to intrude in a way that often happens with frontier films. Even the slow dissolves that punctuate the film have a stubborn, sad tinge to them, most often Grainier’s pensive face carried over into the next scene, a man literally out of time. There’s a fantastic score by Bryce Dessner of The National, piano and strings, by turns driving, mournful and comforting.

Train Dreams isn’t an overtly political film, but it has clear moral and philosophical concerns. I was struck by the film’s passionate environmentalism, which is modern in its articulation, though expressed through the homespun rambling of explosives expert Arn Peeples (William H. Macy). The other connection speaks to the present moment in America. As a young boy, Grainier sees the eviction of Chinese workers from the town, which haunts him. This is made worse when he witnesses the shocking killing of a Chinese man working with him on the railroad. Chinese labour was instrumental in building American railroads in the 19th century. The focus on violent expulsion of immigrants feels extremely relevant at a time when the same thing is happening in America again. (For a Chinese perspective on early America, I’d recommend Warrior, a series based on an original treatment by Bruce Lee, about an immigrant martial artist in 1870s San Francisco. It’s a pulpy, flamboyant action series, nothing at all like Train Dreams, but still a fascinating look at the early Chinese experience in that country.)

Because the film keeps such a tight focus on Grainier, it’s easy to not notice the decades rolling by. Whenever a major change is thrust upon the viewer—power tools being used to cut down trees, for instance, after so many scenes of Grainier with his axe and saw—it feels like the film has lurched ahead in time, whereas it’s actually our protagonist who’s stuck in his ways. When Grainier finally visits Washington D.C. at the end of the film, wanders the crowded streets and sees the ongoing space mission on TV, it seems impossible that this is the same film we’ve been watching. It ends on a remarkable grace note, as Grainier takes a ride in a biplane. This man who’s been hungry for meaning through the whole film, finally, “on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down… felt, at last, connected to it all”.

‘Train Dreams’ is on Netflix.